NanoVMs: Does The World's Software Infrastructure Need a Revamp?

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

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President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act introduced a $1.2 trillion plan to attempt a revitalization of America's infrastructure, touching everything from railroads and bridges to water, broadband and energy systems.

The decision comes after the nation’s infrastructure system earned a C score from the American Society of Civil Engineers and acts as a catalyst to prompt the rebuilding of American competitiveness. The breadth of the infrastructure bill has infused optimism into some American operators and consumers who view the passing of this bill as a commitment to future strength and prosperity.

Infrastructure-related companies like Home Depot Inc. HD and Applied Materials Inc. AMAT have both possibly been benefactors of this optimism, breaching all-time highs and prompting institutional buying and analyst coverage. However, at the same time, some believe that digital infrastructure has been largely neglected in the passing of this bill. 

Proponents of this view argue for the equal importance of digital infrastructure for the prosperity of the country. With cybercrime rising 6-fold in 2021 and with ransomware incidents doubling, governments, corporations and even cities functioning on outdated IT infrastructure are swimming in a pool of vulnerability.

Advocates of the digital infrastructure revamp claim that the adoption of a new kind of infrastructure might solve this problem — one that reshapes our operating systems and creates a platform where hackers are unlikely to succeed.

NanoVMs (a company running a capital-raising round via crowdfunding) is one such advocate. Through the use of unikernels, the company suggests that governments, corporations, individuals and important entities can keep their information safe from malicious hackers.

The Unikernel Infrastructure

“Our technology systems keep the state government running,” Minnesota Chief Information Officer Thomas Baden said. “If they go down due to cyberattacks or other issues, millions of Minnesotans’ private data — over $28 billion in annual transactions and over 300,000 daily transactions — are at risk.”

Security issues remain a key challenge in cloud adoption while the ever-increasing need for more software drives cost and complexity up. Unikernels may serve as a potential solution to this problem; in fact, NanoVMs claims that only 0.1% of hacking attacks surface with the use of unikernels, yet they remain inaccessible to most organizations.

The technology is simply an application that has been boiled down to a small, secure, lightweight virtual machine. This machine has certain properties that make hacking unlikely. For one, it’s a single-process system, meaning that, unlike on Linux and Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT Windows, hackers would have to actually work to run their systems instead of sending some kind of automated script. Additionally, unikernels have no users — reducing remote code execution — and no shells, which are 40-year-old constructs that can create even more vulnerabilities.

Mesh these features with unikernels’ refreshingly low number of required lines of code, and you have an IT infrastructure that’s reportedly extremely difficult to manipulate by design.

NanoVMs reports offering a slew of use cases for its unikernels. Describing its cloud-migration services, NanoVMs notes: “NanoVMs unikernels come packaged as the basic cloud unit of a virtual machine, allowing you to lift and shift from one cloud to another at a moment's notice.” A visit to NanoVMs’s digital transformation solutions shows how unikernels allow you to improve efficiency, decision making and reduce risk.

The company boasts a variety of other unikernel-driven services, including microservices for software development, serverless deployment of applications and continuous integration and delivery. Through these services, NanoVMs is hoping to help bring the digital infrastructure makeover it believes is needed.

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This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.